The Dark Tower - Stephen King [246]
“Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead—”
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
“Is that the Crimson King?” she asked, pointing. She didn’t quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.”
“Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on the way by.” And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.
This time the gunslinger’s smile was faint and distracted. “I don’t think it will be so easy,” he said.
Susannah sighed. “Actually I don’t, either.”
They had what they’d come for—quite a bit more, in fact—but they still found it hard to leave Sayre’s office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn’t want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre’s desk and roll it up. Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.
In the end, maybe it’s just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
“We’ll leave it,” he said. “Soon enough—in months, maybe even weeks—we’ll have the real thing to look at.”
“Do you say so?” she asked faintly. “Roland, do you really say so?”
“I do.”
“All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn’t you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn’t that how a writer would want it?”
“That doesn’t mean he can do it,” Roland said. “Stephen King’s not the water, Susannah—he’s only the pipe the water runs through.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely believe it.”
Roland wasn’t completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the battle of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
“I started lone-john, but that’s not how I’ll finish,” he said. She had been making her way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he plucked her out of it and settled her on his right hip, the one that no longer pained him. “You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the door, you’ll be with me when I climb the stairs, you’ll be with me when I deal with yon capering red goblin, and you’ll be with me when I enter the room at the top.”
Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her. In truth it felt like a lie to both of them.
Two
They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher’s knife, and a handy little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary kitchen.
“It’s Sterno,” she told the gunslinger when he inquired.
“Good stuff. You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue